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Friday, October 26, 2018

Surrealist International in danger?

Grandizo
Munis was a Spanish Trotskyist militant who broke with the Fourth International
in 1948 and formed his own little group, known as FOR (Fomento Obrero
Revolucionario). From what I heard, FOR was Left Communist, but with certain
tendencies towards anarchism. There is very little material on Munis available
in English, at least I haven´t seen much. “Socialism on Trial” includes a
criticism by Munis of the SWP´s conduct during the Minneapolis trials, penned
during his Trotskyist period. Then there is the material under review here, the
pamphlet “The Fourth International in Danger” published by the otherwise
unknown Greenleaf Press. It contains documents from 1944-48 written by Munis
and his co-worker Benjamin Péret alias Peralta, apparently one of the founders
of the Surrealist movement in France. What makes the documents sensational is
that Trotsky´s widow, Natalia Sedova-Trotsky, decided to support the small
dissident faction, at the time based in Mexico among Spanish exiles. Two of the
documents reprinted in this pamphlet were written by Natalia Sedova, and one
other is co-signed by her. The pamphlet does not include her letter of resignation
from the Fourth International, since she apparently resigned later than the
Munis-Peralta group. Nor is it stated when the pamphlet was published. A small
group of FOR supporters apparently existed in the United States around 1980.

The
Munis-Peralta group, at least in their 1944-48 incarnation, still claimed to be
Trotskyist and Leninist. Their criticism of the Fourth International leadership
is eclectic. It blends “sectarian”, anti-Stalinist and vaguely libertarian
socialist positions. The FI leadership is sharply attacked for its alleged
attempts to suppress dissent within the International, the Munis group instead
calling for extensive rights to form tendencies and factions. The Soviet Union
should not be defended, Stalinism and its Red Army being counter-revolutionary
through and through, and no different from the Western alliance. Nationalizations
have become anti-proletarian, in effect expropriating the working class, and
cannot therefore be supported either (presumably this refer to nationalizations
carried out by capitalist or Stalinist-dominated states). A united front with
Stalinists and Social Democrats is out of the question, Munis and his
collaborators rejecting the slogan of the French Trotskyists for a CP-SP government.
All forms of entryism into reformist or Stalinist parties is also rejected, and
the Munis group actually claims at one point that the European proletariat is
highly conscious and revolutionary, simply looking for a chance to support an unsullied
revolutionary leadership! Eh, come again? On the “opportunist” side of things,
the Munisites actually call for an alliance of all left-socialist groups which
are opposed to Stalinism and Social Democracy! The group´s position on
Surrealist art is never stated, though…

I think
Munis and Péret must have realized at some point that their criticism of the
Fourth International made little sense from within a fundamentally Trotskyist
worldview. Their anti-Stalinism was of a more “democratic” nature than that of
the FI, while other positions sound more ultraleftist. Also, Munis clearly had
no respect for the leaders and militants of the FI majority (including the
SWP), his polemic frequently being sarcastic or over-the-top. At one point, he
says that the SWP might just as well support the Western side in a coming
conflict with the Soviet Union, such is their political confusion! I get the
impression that Munis-Peralta were already on their way out when they wrote
these documents. Nor is it surprising that they eventually ended up on the
anarchist-Left Communist side of the political spectrum.